In which I make a request.

I hope some of the friends I had in Sixth Form read this. This one is to you.

Apologies if this comes across at all sentimental. It's nearly three o'clock in the morning and my plan is to hit "publish" without re-reading it or I'll refuse to put it on the Internet at all.

So I came across my yearbook tonight. I say yearbook, I mean the notebook a certain person bought for me as I was too stubborn to buy the actual yearbook. Regardless, it's been a while since I actually read it and curiosity got the better of me.

It's been a confusing and downright mental couple of years over here, and the last couple of months have been particularly hard. I say that, but I don't really know if they've been worse than others - memory is a funny thing. But tonight when I read the words so many of you had thoughtfully and honestly put down on paper in your own handwriting about school, things we'd done together and your thoughts about me, I had a number of realisations, particularly about myself, that I couldn't really put into words if I tried. You seem to have seen things in me that I never fully appreciated. I wonder if any of you have that, where you suddenly know something but you cannot really explain quite what it is?

To those of you to whom I've barely spoken in the last two years, I don't think many of you would have recognised me if you'd seen me at university. I've not been the same person I once was at school and in Sixth Form. Although I half knew this myself, the words you wrote down in this book have really just kicked it into me, and I'm determined to be at least some of that person - hopefully the good bits! - that I once was. I'm not going to quote it or refer to specific things, I just want you to know that your eighteen- (or seventeen-) year-old selves have just helped out twenty-year-old me. So thank you.

And if any of you who wrote in that book are actually reading this, please contact me (if you feel you want to, of course). I mean this especially to those whose contact with me has been sporadic or nil. I want to know what's happening in your lives, I want to know how you are, what you've done and who's affected you in the last two years since I may have seen you. I've come to a point where I no longer care quite so much who thinks what about whom (and hasn't that been a long time coming) and I just want to know about you. I want to re-establish contact, and links. I know you can't go back to the way things used to be as so much is different now, although I'd love to just be a fly on the wall of the common room during our Sixth Form for a little while. But just because we left school, it doesn't mean we have to leave lives.

So here we go, I'm about to click that "publish" button... Five, four, three, two, on-

In which I have a positive frame of mind.

Sometimes, you get stuck in a rut.

Now I know that not everybody sees the world the way I do; but for all my faults I’m trying hard to see it as an opportunity. The world that is, not the rut.

In which all travel is finalised, and I chat about Cardiff.

Above lie two of the tickets which will seal my fate.

I jest. I'm looking forward to it now. Towards the end of the next five weeks, I'll post about why.

"Above lie the two tickets which will transport me across France," would be a better description. So that's it! This evening I bought my final train ticket from Paris Saint Lazare to Bréauté-Beuzeville for the sum total of €15 (you have no idea how long it took me to find that euro sign - just one of the ways in which I'll change during the next twelve months!).

However, now I've shared that, I am going to discuss something else.

A shout-out (If I were a poet, it would be "an ode")

To the best person in my life.

The one who I've been able to speak to about almost anything (because there are always some things I'll keep to myself), and the one who just hugs me when I feel low.

The most consistent, the most open, the most supportive and the most encouraging, even though she's busier than I can ever fully grasp.

I don't think - I know that if she had not been around these last two decades I would not be the person I am, and I would not still be standing. There, that's the answer to the question I've been asking myself today.

Thanks, Mom. For all my words, for all my writing, that's all I think I can say.